Star's Reach (28 page)

The tough turned to me. “Sir and Mister,” he
said, “This woman, she’s old Anna, who does laundry and sewing for
some of the officers up at the fort. If she’s from Star’s Reach,
I’m the presden’s one and only virgin daughter.”

That got me laughing, too. “Tell you what,” I
said. “Upstairs there’s a scholar from Melumi who knows everything
anybody knows about Star’s Reach. If this Anna’s lying, we’ll know
right away, and you can chuck her out the door once we chuck her
down the stair.” I turned to Anna, who looked at me with her head
tilted just a little and a look on her face that might have meant
anything. “And if you are lying, you probably want to turn right
around and leave now.”

“I’ll gladly talk to your scholar,” she said,
without a bit of hesitation in her voice. The tough shrugged and
stepped out of the way, I motioned with my head, and Anna and I
crossed the bar and went up to our rooms.

Everybody was there in the common room we’d
rented except Banyon, who was still out settling things with the
tribespeople, and every eye in the place turned toward us the
moment they realized there was somebody else with me. “This is
Anna,” I said by way of explanation. “She’s made a pretty
remarkable claim.”

“What the ruinman means,” she said at once,
“is that I was born at Star’s Reach. I hear you’re trying to get
there.”

That got a moment’s dead silence. Jennel
Cobey glanced from me to Anna to Eleen and back to me; the others
looked at each other; Eleen looked straight at Anna and said,
“That’s quite a remarkable claim. Would you care to say more about
it?”

“My mother,” said Anna, “was a linguistic
analyst, and my father was a software engineer. Both of them were
E-6 technical specialists.”

Eleen’s eyebrows went up, so I knew the words
meant something. “And you?”

“I was five years old when we left. We and a
few dozen others were the last ones alive; that’s what my parents
told me.”

“Can you lead us there?” This from the
jennel.

“I don’t know,” Anna said. “It was a long
time ago.” Then she explained about the fingerprint locks, and I
explained that that was why I’d brought her up, and then everybody
started talking at once, asking questions and then not waiting for
the answers, until finally I held up both hands and we got down to
some serious talk.

That was how Anna joined us. There was still
a lot we didn’t know about her then, and I think there’s still a
lot we don’t know about her even now. Or maybe just one thing: she
knows something we don’t, or thinks she does, about Star’s Reach,
why it’s here and why we’re here. Maybe it’s in the alien-books,
but if it is, I haven’t found it yet.

The thing that makes me wonder about that is
that the alien-books are basically all the same. Start reading and
before long you can count on finding something about aliens
kidnapping people and doing things to them, or about a place called
Roswell, or another place called Area 51, or—well, there are about
a dozen things in all. It’s always those same things, and how the
government’s trying to hide them, and sometime soon the government
will fess up or the aliens will land and then we’ll all know the
truth. There’s never anything about gasoline oceans and rotten-egg
skies, or creatures with a free-swimming ocean phase and an
intelligent communal phase on land, and nothing we’ve learned about
the Cetans makes me think they fly around in spaceships shaped like
dishes, or that they got off their world at all, the way a few of
us did for a little while back before the old world ended.

I didn’t particularly want to keep reading
about those things, but I didn’t have much else to do just then. I
picked one of them and turned to go to the room Eleen and I share,
and just then I heard Berry’s voice off in the computer room; I
couldn’t tell what he said, but it was loud enough and excited
enough that I got up and headed that way.

By the time I was halfway down the hall he
came hurrying to find me. “Found it,” he said. “The first picture’s
loading right now.”

So we went and found Thu and Anna, and all
four of us hurried back to the computer room and crowded around the
screen. It was black when we first got there, with a little line of
brownish orange along the top, but the line got wider a bit at a
time as we watched, and shapes started to appear. After a while I
realized that they were clouds, like Mam Gaia’s clouds, but brown
and orange and gold instead of white and gray and blue.

Bit by bit the whole screen filled with a
picture: a rocky landscape with ocean off in the hazy distance. The
ocean was brown except where it caught the light and shone red like
fire; some of the rocks were bluish and others were purplish. Most
of them looked like rocks on Mam Gaia, except for the color, but in
the front of the picture they were smooth, and there was a golden
pool in the middle of the smooth place.

In front of the pool were five blobby pale
yellow shapes that didn’t look like much of anything, except that
they were more or less in the middle of the picture. I guessed the
picture was probably a picture of them. I wondered what they were,
and then all at once realized that they were Cetans.

I stared at them for I don’t know how long.
It’s one thing to read about alien beings on another world, and I’d
done a lot more reading about those than the others who came with
me to Star’s Reach, what with the alien-books and the stories. It’s
another to see them, or pictures of them, and know that the blobby
shapes in the picture spent years sending messages to our world,
and trying to figure out the messages that came back. For me, at
least, they stopped being aliens and turned into people, and the
fact that they didn’t have a blessed thing in common with me or any
of Mam Gaia’s children other than minds that could look up at the
stars and wonder if there was someone to talk to, out there,
somehow made me think of them as people even more.

“I can load the next one,” said Tashel Ban
then, “if everyone’s ready.”

Everyone was ready. It took a while to load,
like the first one, and again the first thing we saw was the sky.
This time it was deep orange, and the brown ocean was nowhere in
sight. Instead, there was a blue and purple landscape with a
building. It was made of stone, or something like stone, and it was
purple like a lot of the rocks were, but it wasn’t like any
building any human being would ever have thought of putting up, not
even in the last days of the old world, when they put up some
pretty strange things.

You could tell at a glance that it was meant
to bring rain in, not to keep it out, and it wasn’t divided up into
floors with rooms, because—or at least that’s my guess—the Cetans
don’t think that way about buildings any more than they do about
numbers. It was a little like a bunch of wobbly-looking plates or
shallow bowls piled all anyhow, bigger ones on the bottom and
smaller ones further up, except that the sides of most of the
plates turned into ramps that led to plates further up or plates
further down. There were Cetans all over it, lots of them, piled up
all anyhow in heaps in the bowls or moving up and down the
ramps.

At first, I couldn’t make any sense of the
building at all. Still, ruinmen have to learn a lot about how
buildings stay up, since part of our job is making them fall down.
After a while, looking at the plates or bowls or whatever they
were, I could see how each part of the structure carried its own
weight and passed it on down to the foundations. After another
moment, I could see how the gasoline rain pooled here and flowed
there, so the Cetans who used the building, whatever they were
doing with it, could keep themselves wet the whole time. Another
moment still, and I realized what that meant: on Mam Gaia or Tau
Ceti II, take your pick, stone weighs a lot and liquids flow
downhill.

That may not sound like too big of a
discovery to whoever reads this, if anybody ever does. Still, since
Tashel Ban and Eleen first got the computer to give them one of the
briefing papers a couple of months ago, I’ve mostly been thinking
about how different the Cetans are from us, how different their
world is, and so on. All of us have been thinking about that, and
it’s all true enough, but a world where stones are heavy and rain
puddles and flows is a world that follows the same rules ours does,
even if we and the Cetans don’t understand those rules in anything
like the same way. That was when I understood why, in spite of all
the differences between us and them, we could still figure out a
way to talk to each other, because some things are always real.

After a bit, Tashel Ban asked if we were
ready for the next picture, and we were. Right at the moment I
don’t remember a lot of details from the rest of it, other than
skies that were always brown and orange and gold, and blue and
purple rocks, and blobby yellow Cetans. There was one picture of a
Cetan being born, if that’s what you call what happens when a lot
of free-swimming plastic sheet things come crawling up onto a beach
and join together to make an intelligent-phase Cetan; there was
another of a Cetan dying, if that’s anything like what it means
when they run out of whatever it is the free-swimming phase gathers
in the sea, and turn dark yellow-brown and go back to the sea and
separate out into a couple of hundred plastic sheet things again. I
hope the people who used to live here at Star’s Reach sent them
pictures of one of us being born, and one of us dying or dead—and
if they did, I wonder what the Cetans thought about those.

Tashel Ban’s trying to figure out how to make
one of the color printers work; he says that it has an IOC label,
so ought to run come drought or drowning rains. If he gets it to
work, there’ll be copies for everyone. Even if he doesn’t, I can
look at the pictures later, and I’ll do that, since I was thinking
too much about what’s always real when I should have been looking
at Tau Ceti II. One of the pictures was still on the computer
screen when I left the room, daring me to think about what it would
be like to stand somewhere none of Mam Gaia’s children is ever
going to stand, watch the gasoline waves roll up onto a purple
beach, and talk to a blobby yellow Cetan the way two people from
different corners of Meriga talk over a couple of beers when the
rains are pouring down and passing the time is the only thing
anybody needs to do.

Still, there’s something important we can
learn from the Cetans. That came to mind later on, when Anna and I
were washing up after dinner. We didn’t talk much at all; I was too
distracted by my thoughts and she was off somewhere by herself, the
way she usually is, and glancing at me now and then out of the
corners of her eyes, as though she was waiting for me to say
something or do something. That reminded me of the way Plummer so
often said something and then watched me, waiting for an answer I
didn’t yet know how to give him, but Plummer always turned toward
me and looked straight at me when he did that. With Anna, the look
is always sidelong, and if she’s waiting for an answer it’s not one
I have.

The thing that came to mind as I was drying
dishes, though, is that maybe the alien-books had it wrong, not
just a little wrong but as wrong as you can get. All of them,
whether they thought the aliens were going to save us, or teach us
something, or conquer us, or eat us for dinner—well, to start with,
it’s always about us; it’s always about how human beings are so
important to the aliens that they’re going to travel all the way
from another star to do something for us, or with us, or to us. But
it’s more than that.

What the alien-books are saying, at least the
ones I’ve read so far, is that what we think is real isn’t real:
that the skies are really full of alien spaceships even though we
don’t think they’re there, or that the government is really hiding
the aliens or in cahoots with them or something else secret and
scary, or that the aliens are going to give us all kinds of
wonderful new science and technology that will prove that we don’t
really have to pay attention to Mam Gaia’s limits and laws, or
something else like that. The books are always about how the
universe isn’t what we think it is.

So far, though, the Cetans aren’t telling us
any of that. If we’re important to them, it’s the same way that
they’re important to us, the way that families in some out of the
way valley up in the Tenisi hills are important to each other,
since there’s nobody else you can invite over to talk and share a
meal and sip whiskey as the sun goes down. Now of course they can’t
come visit us, any more than we can go visit them, but it would be
a lonelier universe if they weren’t out there in their gasoline
pools and their buildings made of big stone plates. The thing
they’re telling us, though, is even more important than that:
they’re telling us that what’s real is always real.

Tashel Ban said that the people who were here
before us here had to explain to the Cetans how we see pictures, so
they would know to put whatever we were supposed to see somewhere
in the middle of the pictures they sent us. It never would have
occurred to them to put those five Cetans right in front of the
pool, spread apart so we could see them, in the middle of the first
picture, since they see—or whatever you call it—in all directions
at once. Pictures with edges and something to look at in the middle
are a human thing, and whatever Cetan pictures are like is a Cetan
thing, but there are things you find in both, like rocks that are
heavy and rain that pools and flows, and that just might teach us
and the Cetans both that some of what we think is so really is so,
all the way from our side of the sky to theirs.

That may not sound like much of a thing to
value. Still, thinking back over the long road that got me here, I
remember too many times that I thought something was true when it
wasn’t, and too many others that I thought something wasn’t true
when it was. For that matter, the priestesses say that the old
world died because so many people kept on insisting that things
they ought to have known were true weren’t true at all, and kept on
insisting on it even when Mam Gaia kept slapping them across the
face with the truth, over and over again. So if a blobby yellow
alien in a pool of gasoline can look at any of the things we think
we know and say, “Yes, that’s what it looks like to us, too,”
that’s worth something, and if that’s all we find here, maybe the
long road’s still been worth walking.